I'm a long time user of Spiceworks but it has always been in a domain environment so I haven't come across these issues.. I'm starting a side business and for each of my clients I want to have an install of Spiceworks reporting back to my server..

The problem I am having is that, for example, one of my clients has a mix of XP Home, 7 Ultimate, and XP Pro all in a workgroup..

As of now I've been remoting into each PC, creating the same user account on all PC's that I will scan with, installing SNMP (on the Home PC's), running the "netsh firewall set service remoteadmin enable" for the firewalls, etc.. It's been a real pain in the ass..

I'm wondering if anyone has come across this and has any shortcuts, scripts, ideas, etc to make this process a whole lot smoother..

2 Replies

A workgroup environment is certainly more dificult to set up for Spiceworks, since you don't have AD, GP and login scripts to use to automate the setup of the workgroup PCs.

We have used scripts, in the same way you might with login scripts, stored in a shared location and then executed on each PC, this still involves visiting each PC even if only using psexec to run the script remotely from one of the onsite PCs.

Thankfully most workgroup environments are on the small side, having few client PCs needing to be dealt with.

In the case of Home edition PCs, XP, Vista or Windows 7, they don't have WMI so can only offer data to Spiceworks using SNMP, which is quite a bit more dificult to do without physically visiting the PC.

It'll be interesting to see if anyone comes up with some clever way to do this, but I don't think there is one method that will work for Home, Pro and Ultimate since they all need extra or less or specific attention. In the case of Windows 7 and Vista UAC needs to be dealt with too, like this: http://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/show/317